The Crowded Grave

this woman who had won his master’s heart.
    And now he watched Isabelle as she coolly chaired a committee of men who were themselves accustomed to command. She drove the meeting briskly, letting each man be heard and ticking off the points on her agenda. She was pale and looked tired, and once Bruno saw a spasm of pain pass across her face as she shifted position in her chair. The bullet she had taken on the beach at Arcachon in December had left her with a titanium implant in her thigh. Slim as she always had been, she was now thinner with hollows in her cheeks and shadows under her eyes.
    A cane leaned on the arm of her chair, and she had not risen to greet him when Bruno had entered the long room at the château. It had been painted a pale gray. A handsome table with curved gilt legs, at least twelve feet long, dominated the center of the room. Burgundy-colored velvet curtains were draped at the row of windows that looked out onto the terrace and the open field where the brigadier’s helicopter had landed.
    “
Merci, mon
Général,” Isabelle said as the chief gendarme for the
département
concluded his report on the number of security teams he could provide. They had already heard from J-J for the Police Nationale, from the specialist VIP escort unit, from the communications team and the ministry’s facilities group, which were in charge of preparing the château. The meeting had opened with a report from Carlos on the latest Spanish intelligence, which was much as Bruno had heard it that morning. Suddenly Isabelle looked across at him, not a trace in her voice or her eyes of what they had been to each other.
    “Chef de Police Courrèges, anything you wish to say on local concerns and developments?” Her voice was as anonymously official as it had been throughout the meeting. Her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere above Bruno’s head.
    “Very little, mademoiselle,” Bruno said. “We have recently come across an unidentified corpse, shot many years ago. There’s been a case of animal rights vandalism; some foreign students from a local archaeology dig seem to be behind it. But there’s nothing so far to suggest any connection with our summit. And at Senõr Gambara’s request interviews have been conducted of local people with Spanish connections without significant result.”
    Bruno disliked the way he sounded in official reports, the way the bureaucratic phrases came to his lips as they had in his days in the army. The words felt lifeless as he spoke them, justas they had sounded when he listened to the reports from the others around the table.
    “Keep us informed of any developments in those two cases you mentioned,” Isabelle said. “But let’s make sure we check everything, particularly those foreign students. If you could let me have a list of names and passport numbers I can make the usual inquiries. Any of them Spanish?”
    “No,” said Carlos. “It was the first thing I checked.”
    “I’ll e-mail you the list,” Bruno said.
    “I have a liaison meeting with the prefect in Périgueux tomorrow, so we won’t bother with the morning meeting. If there is no other business we’ll convene again at six tomorrow evening,
messieurs
,” Isabelle said. She closed the file in front of her and put away her pen. She did not rise, but sat back in her seat and closed her eyes as the men shuffled to their feet and began to file out to their cars, talking in low voices. Bruno delayed rising, hoping to exchange a private word with Isabelle, but the large figure of J-J loomed into view, his expression unusually grim.
    “Why have you got me taking over this minor case of accidental discharge of a firearm?” J-J asked. Carlos had perched on the edge of the long table beside Isabelle and had said something to make her smile. Bruno felt a surge of something that he hoped wasn’t jealousy; perhaps it was just pleasure at seeing her face come alive.
    “Because my mayor and your subprefect are members of the same hunting club as the guy who fired the shot,” Bruno told him. “And because it’s in your interest to keep Capitaine Duroc from blundering into the scene, which would ruin the first case of that new magistrate you warned me about.”
    J-J pursed his lips as Bruno briefly explained the informal agreement that he had brokered between Kajte and the farmers.J-J would be sympathetic to anything that could reduce his paperwork.
    “Any chance of persuading the Dutch girl to head back to